Austria, of the 112 industrial directors who held more than seven simultaneous directorships in 1917, half were Jews associated with the great banks, and in interwar Hungary, more than half and perhaps as much as 90 percent of all industry was controlled by a few closely related Jewish banking families. In 1912, 20 percent of all millionaires in Britain and Prussia (10 million marks and more in the Prussian case) were Jews. In 1908–11, in Germany as a whole, Jews made up 0.95 percent of the population and 31 percent of the richest families (with a “ratio of economic elite overrepresentation” of 33, the highest anywhere, according to W. D. Rubinstein). In 1930, about 71 percent of the richest Hungarian taxpayers (with incomes exceeding 200,000 pengő) were Jews. And of course the Rothschilds, “the world’s bankers” as well as the “Kings of the Jews,” were, by a large margin, the wealthiest family of the nineteenth century. 14 Generally speaking, Jews were a minority among bankers; bankers were a minority among Jews; and Jewish bankers competed too fiercely against each other and associated too much with erratic and mutually hostile regimes to be able to have permanent and easily manageable political influence (Heine called Rothschild and Fuld “two rabbis of finance who were as much opposed to one another as Hillel and Shammai”). Still, it is obvious that European Jews as a group were very successful in the new economic order, that they were, on average, better off than non-Jews, and that some of them managed to translate their Mercurian expertise and Mercurian familism into considerable economic and political power. The pre–World War I Hungarian state owed its relative stability to the active support of the powerful business elite, which was small, cohesive, bound by marriage, and overwhelmingly Jewish. The new German Empire was built not only on “blood and iron,” as Otto von Bismarck claimed, but also on gold and financial expertise, largely provided by Bismarck’s—and Germany’s—banker, Gerson von Bleichröder. The Rothschilds made their wealth by lending to governments and speculating in government bonds, so that when members of the family had a strong opinion, governments would listen (but not always hear, of course). In one of the most amusing episodes in Alexander Herzen’s My Past and Thoughts , “His Majesty” James Rothschild blackmails Emperor Nicholas I into releasing the money that the father of Russian socialism has received from his serf-owning German mother. 15 Money was one means of advancement; education was the other. The two were closely connected, of course, but proportions could vary considerably. Throughout modern Europe, education was expected to lead to money; only among Jews, apparently, was money almost universally expected to lead to education. Jews were consistently overrepresented in educational institutions